Deeptech: AI, Space and Defence get boosts

In the first clutch of these Deeptech columns, I bemoaned what has often seemed to be a widening gap between Europe and the U.S. in investment and outright thirst for innovation in key technology fields. This week, something wonderful seems to have happened. Several wonderful somethings, in fact.

It starts with a dramatic announcement of a new three-year budget for the European Space Agency. Government ministers met last week to decide on the budget and eventually awarded the agency €22.1 billion. This, as Science.org notes, is a dramatic uptick from the €16.9 billion awarded in 2022 when the last decision was made, and the new figure represents a 32 percent boost, before taking inflation into account. The award was surprising for one critical reason: when European ministers like this meet, they’re typically presented with a request from the ESA that includes all sorts of bells and whistles and an eye-popping cash figure, which they then slash and dice until they get down to a smaller award that they deem acceptable. This time, they almost exactly agreed to ESA’s budget request, a situation that’s “never happened before,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher admitted at a press conference. 

Even more interesting, the award specifically sets aside €900 million for the European Launcher Challenge—a competition designed to spur innovation for next-generation rocket systems that may rival the kind of industry-upsetting launchers Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been firing into space for years. You can argue that this challenge is way too late, but you can’t fault the hopes embodied in that €900 million: it’s more than twice what ESA had asked for. 

But here’s the inevitable glum note. As exciting as the big uptick in space spending is, ESA’s still mostly trying to skate to where the puck has been, rather than anticipating truly future-facing tech. And the sums of money just aren’t comparable: NASA’s predicted 2026 budget is around $20 billion (roughly €17 billion). For a single year. ESA’s new pocket money has to spread over three years. And that €900 million to help reinvent reusable medium- and heavy-life rockets like SpaceX’s already successful Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy? SpaceX—a private company, remember—has already spent an estimated $5 billion building out infrastructure and test vehicles for the Falcon’s replacement, the reusable Starship, due for its 12th test flight soon.

Europe’s politicians did add one interesting wrinkle to the ESA budget. It included a new “Resilience from Space” program, which is designed to develop tech destined for “non-aggressive” defence uses. ESA has mainly been a civilian-focused organization, so this represents something of a sea change. 

Meanwhile, also in defence, two EU diplomats confirmed to Politico that Canada and the EU had reached an agreement that would see Canada take part in the €150 billion “Security Action for Europe” (SAFE) program. This is reportedly the first time a third country will take part formally in the program, which was set up in May to provide financial support to member states to “speed up defence readiness” in the bloc by facilitating speedy and “major” investments in support of EU’s defence industry, with “a focus on closing critical capability gaps,” per the EU’s official website. 

Great news for Canadian-European dealmaking. But where’s the UK you may ask? France’s LeMonde newspaper reported Friday that talks to include the UK in SAFE broke down.

The timing, given the need to present a united front in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, couldn’t be worse. And it just looks bad for the U.K., especially as news arrived this weekend that the Netherlands and Kyiv have signed an agreement to jointly produce drones under a “Build with Ukraine” banner, Aviacionline reports. The agreement was made partly under SAFE, and could easily boost innovative drone production for defence purposes in Europe. 

Unusually, it’s taken until this part of the column to talk about AI. There’s another interesting, positive development here, too. European lawmakers are reportedly taking steps to soften and adapt some of the bloc’s landmark, but highly restrictive, privacy laws to allow AI tech to flourish. In their sights are the famous GDPR law, the recent AI act that tightly regulates the burgeoning industry, the ePrivacy directive, and the Data Act, the Guardian notes. The changes are apparently designed to make it easier for EU-based companies to train AI models using European users’ data without necessarily having to ask for consent. 

It’s far from a giant hundred-billion-Euro scale investment, and it’s certainly no parallel to U.S. efforts to unchain and deregulate AI (controversial as they may be). But it’s a move in a sensible direction.

European netizens, however, will probably be far happier about another privacy law tweak that EU lawmakers are planning: they want to reduce the frequency of annoying “cookie banner” popups that websites have had to put in place to comply with the GDPR law (a document that itself runs to some 50,000 detailed words).

L'innovation? Oui, absolument.